New board provides easy evaluation of FireWire connectivity solution

A new evaluation board from Oxford Semiconductor provides an easy way for engineers to evaluate the performance of the company's FireWire to ATA/ATAPI (IDE) bridge solution based on the OXFW900 chip. The board demonstrates a complete three-chip solution consisting of the OXFW900, 1394 PHY chip and ROM. Connections are made using a standard IDE connector and two FireWire ports. The bridging solution is a fast, cost-effective way for manufacturers of removable media drives, optical drives and hard disk drives to provide FireWire connectivity. Using the bridge introduces no bottleneck to data flow, minimises R&D expenditure and reduces time-to-market. The demand for FireWire peripherals is growing rapidly and the number of personal computers equipped with this connectivity standard is expected to grow to 30 million in the next 12 months.

The OXFW900 is a high performance native bridge chip (IDE) with integrated Serial Bus Protocol (SBP-2). It can use generic device drivers available in the Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOS operating systems and supports the standard IEEE 1394A PHY-LINK interface. The sustained IDE data transfer rate is 25Mbps, faster than today's highest performance disk drives require.

The 1394 transaction layer and SBP-2 protocol are implemented using a combination of ARM7TDMI 32-bit RISC processor and an Operational Request Block (ORB) hardware co-processor with a high performance buffer manager.

The buffer manager has a RAM bandwidth of 800Mbps. It provides storage for 1394 and ATA/ATAPI packets, automatically storing them and passing them to the appropriate destinations without any intervention from the processor.

The evaluation board is available on loan to OEMs free of charge for one month.